Speelman on Chess

I reported last week on the Russian team championship in Dagomys near Sochi where the top seeds Ural Ekaterinburg were in the driving seat. Ural, the only team which averaged over 2700(!), duly confirmed their victory last weekend, guaranteeing the win with a round to spare with the help of that blast from the past, the match in which all six games end in draws early on. These 'package deals' used to be very common in the latter stages of Olympiads and other international team events and certainly kept the team captains happy and busy. I'm not entirely sure of their formal status nowadays but nobody was going to object and indeed, following the three-all draw with Vassily Ivanchuk's team TPS Saransk on Saturday, they repeated this against Peter Svidler's FINEK Gazprombank St Petersburg on the Sunday.

None of this made for great viewing over the internet but there was plenty of superb action in the earlier rounds as the superstars bashed into each other and a further extract appears below. The final outcome was that Ural made 17/22 match points and 39.5/66 game points, ahead of Ekonomist Saratov 15 (37), TPS Saransk 14 (37) and FINEK Gazprombank St Petersburg 14 (35.5) [see diagram in next column]. Black has the better pawn structure but the half open g file is a superb attacking conduit and Eljanov opened fire immediately with

19 Bxh7! Nf8 Obviously, if Black takes the bishop then it will be extremely dangerous but you would need to investigate this in a game since this way White intensifies the attack for free.

The English number one Michael Adams, meanwhile, has scored a fine victory in a tournament in Merida in Spain - the 2nd Ruy Lopez International Chess Festival. Ruy Lopez, a sixteenth century Spanish priest and later bishop Ruy Lopez de Segura (c1540-1580) has in English speaking countries given his name to the famous opening sequence 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 - which he analysed in his Libro de la Invencion liberal y arte del juego del Axedrez in 1561. The rest of the world. however, calls it simply the Spanish Opening which is probably more accurate since it stems back to Lucena in 1497: though when I consulted the Oxford Companion to Chess it mentioned the Gottingen manuscript, which may or may not have been written by Lucena and is variously dated between just after 1471 (in which case it would have been one of Lucena's sources) and just after 1500 (in which case he presumably wrote it).

Whatever the opening's exact provenance, it remains a powerful weapon even today, as you can see from Adams's splendid win below. He made 5.5/7 in Merida and was followed by Zhang Pengxiang (China) 5, Sargissian and Humpy Koneru (India) 4.5; Fabiano Caruana (Italy) 2.5; and Julio Granda Zuniga (Peru), Hou Yifan (China) and Manuel Perez Candelario (Spain) all 2.

Michael Adams v Humpy Koneru

Merida 2008 (round 2)

Ruy Lopez

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6

5 0-0 Be7 6 Re1 b5 7 Bb3 d6 8 c3 0-0 9 h3 Na5 10 Bc2 c5 11 d4 Qc7 12 Nbd2 This is the old Chigorin variation which has been contested literally thousands of times over the years.

28...Qc7 29 Nxe7 Bxe7 30 Nf5 Bf8 31 Rc1 Qb8 32 Qf3 Kg8 33 Rc3! The space advantage makes it much easier for White to reposition his forces and here he suddenly switches to a direct kingside attack against which she has no good answer.

33...Nb6

34 Bxh6! This can't be taken this move or next since Qg4+ followed by Rg3 would win on the spot.